Your People
by v-volatile
Summary: Eliot had seen Nate land that punch on Blackpoole’s face, and he’d seen himself in Nate for a moment there, and it only made him think once again: you belong with these people. Your people." Also: a nice dollop of Eliot/Parker.


***

Eliot: the grumpy one, the violent one, muscle-bound/moral-bound, aggressive, brave, the cook, the survivalist, the pilot, the cowboy, the killer/retrieval specialist who had this nasty little thing about _not_ killing people in cold blood that almost foreclosed him out of the damn Business, but that was before he met Nate Ford, and the rest of his adopted family.

As much as they infuriated him he knew he was goddamn lucky to have them.

In Portland he kept an apartment away from the office, and on spring nights he'd run ten or twelve miles around the city at an easy pace, until he got bored with the scenery and somehow ended up winding his way back home. Good thinking time. The team never kept track of it but he spent a few hours each day doing nothing but exerting himself, usually alone. It was also a mental practice. It was a time to file away memories and savor.

Little things hit him in his mind on those runs.

Rounding the curve of a wide block, about to head up the hill back towards the center of the city, he thought suddenly of the time he'd tried to teach Parker to wrestle and had ended up lifting her, throwing her over his shoulder, half hugging and tickling her and taking them both gently down onto the carpet until she dissolved into laughter underneath him as he knelt over her. He'd wanted to kiss her then but he hesitated and missed his chance because he wasn't even sure they were even speaking the same language, him and Parker, and there was no interpreter anywhere in the world.

He bickered with Hardison constantly, just like with a brother: over which game to play, which movie to watch, who got the remote, what to have for dinner. (Hardison did make a mean roasted chicken, though, and his brothers could never do that.) They made fun of one another and he talked shit about Hardison's skills with women and kept his own love life a secret just to piss Hardison off, and even occasionally got drunk and got stupid with him. So: a brother and a good friend.

It was a strange thing to be around people so rich that they had no interest in ripping him off; their whole lives they went around watching their backs religiously, working alone to avoid being killed or otherwise neutralized over their share of the loot from some job, and now here they were, among each other, each of them so rich and established and heavily offshored that there was no point in any swindling among them. Instead of swindling their own, they were sitting around a huge wooden table in the mastermind's loft, perhaps, having a meal. Or driving home from a job on a fog-covered nighttime interstate. Or asleep on a plane on the way back from saving an orphan in Serbia.

Each of them had passed through greed to the other side, the side where you didn't look at price tags anymore but luxury didn't really interest you because you had to be packed and ready to go all the time anyway, but sure you had a nice leather suitcase, right?

Parker could play marbles for hours with her bigger diamonds; she could mosaic her damn bathroom mirror with the lesser semiprecious stones; she had piles of bearer bonds in some musty vault in Switzerland she probably never even thought of. Hardison bought buildings like the kids in his childhood neighborhood collected designer sneakers and baseball caps. He went through computer hardware like some people went through bottles of shampoo. Eliot owned safe-houses all over the world, and some of them even faced oceans.

Nate, well…Nate appreciated a very fine whiskey and god knows what else he did with his shares of it, but he certainly didn't spend it on haircuts and clothes and skin cream and wine and art like Sophie. Maybe he did charity projects? And he certainly did have a nice condo.

Eliot, like Nate, had once had the sensation of his real family being pulled out from under him in a nightmare come to life, a long time ago. But he was tough and not nearly as crafty as Nate, so he responded with the kinetic rage of an angry young man, instead of the legal approach.

Eliot would sooner cripple himself than go back home to the people who'd hurt his family and apologize for the damage he left on his way out like a tornado ripping across the prairie. But he'd seen Nate land that punch on Blackpoole's face, and he'd seen himself for a moment there, and it only made him think to himself yet once again: _you belong with these people. Your people._

***

Once Sophie asked him if he at all missed home, just offhand, in the middle of a long silence.

"No, I've forgotten," he replied, not sure what he'd forgotten, maybe where home was, or perhaps who was there. He turned from her inquisitive stare back to the food he was working on.

He was making Parker's favorite: a time-consuming but worthy pastry from the Balkans called potica. It involved a thin, cold short dough rolled up full of nut filling, and brushed with butter, then baked until golden. He made it with ground walnuts and ground almonds and loads of cinnamon sugar, which was not really authentic, all things considered. But Parker always ate pieces of it warm with a glass of milk while exclaiming how amazing it was that "Eliot could bake a warm loaf of Cinnamon Toast Crunch" and, more recently, that "it shouldn't even be possible for food to taste this good." So he cast authenticity aside. After all, Parker never fucked around when it came to cereal, or anything that tasted like cereal.

"Do you miss home?" He asked Sophie back, after another long silence had passed. Their silences were easy, and she didn't pry; Sophie always was the polite one.

"I think at this point my home is…where Nate is," she said haltingly. "As pathetic as that sounds."

"I don't think that's pathetic at all," Eliot said, after a moment, and gave her a genuine smile as he strode past her to wash his hands in the kitchen sink. "I can understand why you would think that."

"Oh?"

"Now," Eliot continued, drying his hands and tossing the damp kitchen towel over one shoulder, "if you'd only tell poor Nate that."

***

Once, feeling ambitious, he ran the length of Burnside Street, along the sidewalks and soft shoulders and in the weeds on the side of the road. He went east to west, from Hazelwood to Pittcock Acres Park, with the intention of looping back and returning to where he'd parked his truck. But it was a hard day and the air was sharp and cold and his legs weren't cooperating and he turned in the park and started to walk, and called Hardison for a ride home. Hardison didn't pick up. He called Nate. Nate sent the call to voicemail and Eliot hung up, annoyed, and of course two seconds later there's the text message from Nate: "w/ sophie". Eliot rolled his eyes, and resignedly called Parker as a last resort, or else it'd be quite a long walk home.

He is one of the eight people who has her phone number. Four of them, of course, are people that the team has never met.

She answers. "Yes."

"I need a ride. I went for a run and I think I overdid and now I'm walking but I'm not very close to my car, so, if you could maybe drive to, uh, West Burnside and Northwest Hermosa? And then take me back to where I left my car."

"Security situation first. Also, I need to find my keys. Tell me," she said, and so they talked about security in the area, based mostly on Eliot looking around, for several minutes. He knew this made her feel better. But he was not much better. Of course, he had a knife in a thin Velcro sheath strapped to his leg under his sweatpants at that very moment; so when she wanted a status update he never begrudged it.

Parker drove a Camry. This was a little absurd, since it was so normal, but, as she pointed it was reliable, and practical. And thieves needed to be able to rely on their tools, no?

Abruptly, in the middle of their conversation she said, "on my way," and hung up on him. Twenty or twenty-five minutes later there she is, pulling up alongside him in her car which is the color of an evergreen. He waves at her, stands up off the rock he has been sitting on, and climbs in.

"Do you have the flu?" Is the first thing she says, after they've gone halfway back.

"_What_, Parker?"

"Do you have the flu? Or…a cold? Usually you can run forever," she says. "And you don't give up. This is weird."

"I just wasn't feeling it today. This is just exercise, not life or death, you know," Eliot reminds her, because he knows that line is sometimes blurry for her, as it is for him. "Thanks for picking me up. I would have had to walk back."

"I know." She didn't say 'you're welcome', of course. She paused, as they pulled up to a red light, and looked at him, and said, "can we try that wrestling thing again that you showed me when we get home?"

"Okay. But you'll let me take a shower first, right."

"Sure. Except maybe this time, the wrestling thing, it can end with sex?"

"_What, _Parker?! Wh- why? _What?"_ He opened his mouth and closed it again and looked at her, brow knit.

"Well, I saw on TV, the other day, that's a good thing for a girlfriend to do for her boyfriend—to surprise him with spontaneous sex? Right? So I thought I should probably warn you first though with the wrestling because sometimes you get startled when you're surprised and then you punch something."

"That's…that's true, I suppose," he replied, staring, confused and about sixteen kinds of turned on. "Thanks?"

"No problem."

"When did I become the boyfriend, again, though?" He asked, a little incredulously. "I don't think we talked about that before."

"Oh, come on, Eliot, I know that you only bake me those Cinnamon Toast Crunch things because you _lliiiiike _me. I'm not an idiot, you know."

"Right, no, no, you're not an idiot." He took a deep breath. "So I'll take a shower right now, actually, let's just go home, right now. I can get my car tomorrow."

"Okay," she replied, and he could have sworn he saw a sneaky smile cross her face, and he's breathing a little like he's been running and suddenly the car is so warm and he knows that he wants her, but is he ready for this?

***

Down this chain of days I wish to stay among my people.

Relation now means nothing, having chosen so defined.

-Neko Case


End file.
